Inside the Photo

Photos taken on January 1 are important to me as they are the start of a new daily photo set/album on flickr, a practice I have done every year back TO 2008.

For this first day of the new year I traveled from Vancouver to Victoria via BC Ferries. It was the fourth in a row, maybe five, of clear blue sky days here. The color of the red container ship contrasting with the deep blue water yelled to me PHOTO! PHOTO! This was the best of maybe 7 or 8 I took of the ship, which I ultimately (here) framed to make the ship seem separate from everything, just showing the edge of the pier.

One might say the ship is the subject (the red color is what stands out) but it could also be the expanse of open water filling the foreground, right? The editing included a bit of cropping to move the horizon higher than the original and also to trim a bit of the extra pier showing on the right.

I did a bit it of adding saturation to the reds to make the ship stand out (using the color editor in Aperture). I experimented with some HDR filters, but I did not like the grainy effect that put in the sky, so instead I bumped the orange colors, increased the overall saturation.

So there’s not a whole lot of complexity here- instinct suggested the ship would make a good shot, and some waiting to catch the best late afternoon light angle on it. The post edits are mild, it pretty much was how I thought I saw it… but more intense by isolating the ship from the rest of the world around it (cranes on the pier, other ships).

Photography is as much in what you remove from photos as what you include.